Brother Cadfael 16: The Heretic's Apprentice

time to think. And if you had not come..."
    "I know," said Cadfael. "You would have put it out of your mind as of no importance, a mistaken memory. After all, you delivered your charge where it was sent, Fortunata had her money, what possible profit to waste time and thought over a morsel of weight and a few coins jingling? Especially for a man with graver matters on his mind. And you have just accounted for all, very sensibly. But now here am I, stirring the depths that were just beginning to settle. Son, I have just been handling that box again myself. I won't say I noted the difference in weight, except when it jarred you as it did. But what I do most clearly remember is how solid, how stable was that weight. Nothing moved in it when first I held it. It might have been a solid mass of wood in my hands. It is not so now. I doubt if any discarded wrappings of felt could quite have silenced the coins that are in it now, for I have just packed it again myself - six small felt bags, rolled up tightly and pressed in, and still I heard them chink when the box was taken up and carried. No, you were not mistaken. It is lighter than it was, and it has lost that solidity that formerly it had."
    Elave sat silent for a long moment, accepting what was set before him, but dubious of its sense or relevance. "But I do not see," he said slowly, "of what use it is to know these things, even to think them, even to wonder. What bearing has it on anything? Even if it is all true, why should it be so? It's not worth solving so small a mystery, since no one is the better or the worse whether we fathom it or not."
    "Everything that is not what it seems, and not what it reasonably should be," said Cadfael firmly, "must have significance. And until I know what that significance is, in particular if it manifests itself in the middle of murder and malice, I cannot be content. Thank God, no one now supposes that you had any part in Aldwin's death, but someone killed him, and whatever his own faults and misdoings, worse was done to him, and he has a right to justice. I grant it was but natural that most people should take it as certain his sudden death had to do with you and the accusation he made against you. But now, with you out of the reckoning, is not that out of the reckoning, too? Who else in that quarrel had any cause to kill him? So is it not logic to look for another cause? Nothing to do with you and your troubles? But something, nevertheless, to do with your return here. Death came within days of your coming. And whatever is strange, whatever cannot be explained, during these few days since your return may indeed have a bearing."
    "And the box came with me," said Elave, following this path to its logical ending. "And here is something strange about the box, something that cannot be explained. Unless you will now tell me that you have an explanation for it?"
    "A possible one, yes. For consider... We have just been examining the box, emptied of its bags of pence, inside and out. And in the vellum lining of the base there are traces of gold leaf, powdered into fine dust, but the light finds them. And on the deep ivory vellum there is a fine blue bloom, as on a plum. And I think, and so I know does Brother Anselm, though we have not yet spoken of it, that it is the delicate frettings of another vellum once in constant contact with it, and dyed purple. And pressed into a corner there was a fragment of purple vellum frayed from an end tag such as we use on the spines of books in our chests in the library."
    "You are saying," said Elave, watching him in bright-eyed speculation, "that what the box contained at some time was a book - or books. A book that had formerly been kept among others in a chest. That could well be true, but need it mean anything to us now? The thing is old, it could have been used in many ways since it was made. It could be a hundred years since it held a book."
    "So it could," agreed Cadfael, "but for this one thing. That both you and I handled it only five days ago, and have handled it again today, and found it to be lighter in weight, changed in balance, and filled with something that rings audibly when it is tilted or shaken. What I am saying, Elave, is that what it held, not a hundred years ago, but five short days, on the twentieth day of this very month of June, is not what it holds now, on the twenty-fifth."
    "A standard size," said Brother Anselm, demonstrating with his hands on the desk before him. "The skin